Monthly Archives: January 2015

I’ve just finished this book, and as always I’m digesting my feelings on it. I love how Hugh Howey writes regardless of whether or not I love the story itself. I have gone from “holy crap” to “meh” and hit every emotion in between while reading his works, so I feel comfortable giving a lukewarm review on this one.

Part of my struggle with this story is my inability to really sync up with the premise of shells being so rare and coveted that there’s a market for them, let alone high value placed on top notch specimens. I can go along with the idea of global warming and the effects that has on the Earth pretty well, but the fallout from that was hard for me to sink my teeth into. And that, really, was the build-up in the first half of the book. I felt very disconnected from Maya and Ness because I didn’t care about either of their plights.

I appreciated that Hugh spent time building up the relationship between these two. By the time they finally hopped on over into romance land, I felt like the tension was sufficient, and that alone takes talent.

The layout of this story is very very formulaic, and other reviews have done an excellent job in expounding upon that. It was easy to see what was coming and how the romance would crash down before it would rebound back to the resolution long before it happened. I don’t want to say it was predictable, but it was definitely made clear in the text leading up to it.

Maya’s behaviors were maddening at times. I didn’t find her particularly clever or inspiring. I found her to be kind of annoying and immature. Calling up the FBI following her night at the Bahamas house was really weird, and I really expected someone in that position to have struggled a LOT with decisions like that. She seemed on one hand to be completely blown away by her feelings for him and on the other hand to consider them unimportant. I wanted more inner conflict for Maya than I saw when it came to her relationship with Ness and how it affected her outward decisions.

Overall, I started feeling interested in this book around the 50% mark – about the time that they went SCUBA diving. Before that point I had to force myself to keep reading. Following that point the story flowed much easier. I liked Ness exponentially more than I liked Maya. I felt mildly preached-to about the environment. Hugh Howey writes his face off, and any of his books can and should be read for the quality of prose alone.